Graduation Success Rates

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There are 34 NCAA-sanctioned college football bowls — a total of 70 schools, including Minnesota, who earlier this month accepted their second consecutive Texas Bowl invitation. All but two of the 34 bowls are corporately named, including five restaurants, two credit cards, two auto parts stores, two by the same U.S-based television brand, one hotel, one cruise line, one junk-food company, one insurance company, one mortgage company, one on-line tax-preparation software company and one athletic apparel company. Only a pear tree-bound partridge is missing. Meanwhile, what sports fanatics and their cosigning media lackeys don’t endlessly talk about is the poor academic records of most of the teams examined by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) in the University of Central

Florida’s annual academic progress report on the bowl-bound teams.

“The substantial gap between White and African-American football student-athletes remained large for the 70 Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) eligible schools,” wrote TIDES Director Richard Lapchick in his December 9 “Keeping Score When It Counts” report. This includes our state’s only FBS school, the University of Minnesota, which is consistently among college football’s worst in graduating Black players. Continue Reading →

In past years, I used to scrounge newsstands for any piece of needed information to fill out mimeographed bracket sheets, only to later lose my hard-earned money in the worksite pool. Don’t get me wrong — I still sequester myself watching the first two rounds through bloodshot eyes, with the mute button at full volume. However, I no longer act like Marvin Gaye, foolishly asking what’s going on, because I’m now like Johnny Nash and can see clearly now — my eyes are now wide open. While broadcasters and others call it the “Big Dance,” the annual NCAA men’s basketball tournament actually is like the players’ ball where the “pimps” — the television networks, the NCAA, advertisers and big-school officials — all get rich. An estimated $702 million in television revenues will be raked in, and with ticket sales, that amount is expected to balloon to around $797 million. Continue Reading →

All last week, endless bracket stories were told ad nauseam. But not a Mavis Staples hoot about Richard Lapchick’s annual “Keeping Score When it Counts” report on NCAA men’s and women’s tournament teams.

Lapchick, director of The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES), each year examines the Graduation Success Rates (GSR) and Academic Progress Rates (APR) for these teams, and also compares Black and White male and female basketball student-athletes. “The enormous gap between the graduation rates of White and African-American student-athletes narrowed by almost four percent,” wrote Lapchick in his March 12 report: White male players graduate at 88 percent, down from 91 percent in 2011; and 60 percent of Black males graduate, a percent higher than last year. Also, White female players’ graduation rate is 93 percent compared to 85 percent for Black females.

His study also noted that a combined 13 schools — 10 women’s and three men’s — have a higher Black graduation rate than Whites’; and 31 schools — 22 women’s and nine men’s — have a 100-percent graduation rate for both Black and White players. Continue Reading →